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He rejoined his division after recovering and taking part in the battle of the bulge. He later served in the liberated camps at therition end of the war. Ins interview was conducted 2012 for its oral history collection. World war ii museum. 23, 2012 and i ,m here today in norwich vermont. State your full name. Clinton i am clint gardner, clinton gardner. I was born in new york city, 1922. What was life like growing up . Clinton my family moved to larchmont, new york when i was a baby. To theaised their, went town north of larchmont for junior high. After ninthgrade, went down to exeter and had three years there. Dartmouth i entered and once myof 1940 freshman year was behind me, it was apparent by that time that we were not yet in the war, we might be drawn into it because the germans were sinking ships in the atlantic including american ships. Ritain was in bad shape looked like if we did not get in, the nazis would take over europe and south america. So i was unsure whether i wanted to volunteer or wait to be drafted. I decided i would volunteer, which amusingly enough give you a slightly Different Army serial number than if you were drafted. The west point officers, recent graduates from training but they were training us in officer candidate school. They tended to look with favor they didnt say that but it was apparent. I became a second lieutenant. I was a corporal in basic training. I had the amusing experience in my first my iq was perfectly normal, adequate to become an officer but not unusual. Colonel came into my barracks a day or two after the test and said private gardner, the Commanding Officer would like to see you. I followed him and the commanding generals office. Had theyou have just highest mechanical aptitude score on a test we have ever had at fort bevans. What did you do before i came you came into the army . I had been working on farms in vermont. He said you should think about trying to you might be able to get into ocs with this good score. Turneds amusing i never out according to my wife to be aptitudey mechanically , but at that point i made history. Assigned as an aircraft outfit on cape cod. It was cap edwards. Dashcam camp edwards. There was a huge installation where i dont know how many thousands were in training, but there were many thousands there. Battalions were training. The battalion was in the range of 1500 men. There were four batteries and 90 the leader guns, 90 millimeters roughly over three inches. Shell. A very interesting views in had a special it called a proximity fuse only the americans had develops. We did not want germans and japanese to find out about how to make one. It enabled the aircraft outfit feetnd a shell within 60 of a plane and it would still explode. Gave you a higher chance of shooting down a plane. You had to have fairly bright people to run the radar and these guns because there was a lot of technical stuff involved. Antiaircraft i talked aircraft identification. I became a First Lieutenant rather early. It is amusing. Antiaircrafteach ,inification, identification i realized the manuals were six out of dateyear because they got around to putting it magazines that came out monthly in the aircraft field had information on german and japanese planes. Free to continue. Clinton the amusing story about antiaircraft identification was i went out and bought a number projectingd built a box, called a magic lantern. You put a magazine in the bottom of the box and you have a year at an angle and the divine glass at the and magnifying glass at the front. I was able to project pictures from the magazine, screen to teach antiaircraft identification so you could recognize be 50 once and what b51s and whatnot and identify from the german planes. That was one of the reasons i became a First Lieutenant ahead of people older than me, much to their chagrin. Tidbit out ofne six months we were in january for a year from to december. And then we were going, when we ,ent overseas on the queen mary 15,000 men approximately. It was crowded. Over half the men were very seasick. I recall being seasick. I was prone to that. Fortunately the officers had a specific responsibility. We were supposed to go up in the rigging of the ship and other precarious positions to be lookouts for submarines or anything in the water. Degree ofome surveillance but that was not highly developed. Thever understood why germans were not able to torpedo one of these ships. Submarine could get out ahead of them and change its course and it cannot be that do that as rapidly as a huge ship like the queen mary. We went across the northern atlantic and landed in scotland henleyt by plane down to where the regattas are held not 30 minutes out of london. We could see the flashes. We couldnt see the details of the bombing of london but periodically we could see flashes in the sky. Traininghrough regular , as you get more familiar with as the equipment got better, radar would be updated. We were preparing for dday but did not know where it would be. May of in the middle of , i4i learned i and 1944 learned i and the other officers would be spent to it sent to to learn about the details of the land along the plan. These were special camps for people who were going to be leaving the leading the invasion. What beaches it would be on, what the strategy and tactics were. This camp was surrounded by barge wire. The tap armed surrounded by barbed wire. They could shoot anybody who attempted to get out. The obvious reason, such a person would be drunk and on his way to a bar and say, i know when the day is going to be. Dday is going to be, normandy, the beaches the whole thing would have gone down the drain. Dont know how many thousands but very few. Calledurity clients was big it bigot. When we prepared to go across, it was actually june 5 they were proposing to land. We were almost halfway across the channel in preparation for that when we turned around because the weather was too bad. We would not do it until the next day. It was only slightly better but we had to go. We went back and then out again. That experience has not always reported adequately. 6, ie morning of june dont recall i slept much. Not very much. I may have taken sleeping pills. We were told to take one but not too much or we would be foggy landing. The morning of june 6, engineers were going to go in 4 30 with all the shooting and try to blow up obstacles in the jacks,hich were like sixscrossed metal beams, feet time high. They had mines on them. If a ship came near them, they would explode and very likely damage the ship. Inre were maybe thousands the water. The engineers had to try to get rid of them. Anyone seeing the film saving private ryan has seen a reconstruction of what it was like. Omaha dogwas called rather amusing because the big green d was the code used for our beach. Told there would be a huge banner to help books land. Boats land. We have been told the b17 planes would have bombed the beach defenses. O the pillboxes would be destroyed and easy to get off the beach. Told the bombing would be the heaviest bombardment in the future in history, the most intense in one place to take place. We landed around 9 00 that morning. First were engineers, then infantry and general troops like ourselves. When our boat came in around 9 00 and we looked at the beach, it was strewn with hundreds of bodies. We looked up to see where the pillbox was that was supposed to have been destroyed and it was actively shooting on them. There were bursts of flyer fire. The camouflage have not been disturbed. There was a huge barrier preventing you from getting off of the beach, a concrete barrier about 300 feet wide, six feet thick. It was supposed to have been pulverized by the bombing and its own camouflage net was still on it. The bombing which was supposed to be the most intense in history had missed its target. We later learned the bombs had hit Apple Orchard half a mile inland. I often wondered why they had not been able to send they later claimed they could not see butbeach, it was foggy, they should have been able to drop flares and to send in lowflying planes before the bombing was to begin. Lit. Lares that would remain you cant have flares that will aay several minutes, 15 or half hour. If they had done that and dropped, they could have sent those in and determined the flares were in the right place. There often speculated was inadequate planning for what to do about making sure the bombs dropped in the right place. In any case, many of us were killed getting in. I nor any other officers the 310th, lieutenant norman, phillips, and i forget four officers we were all executive officers of the battery, went in and doug foxholes nearg each other but not far from the beach, 50 beach in. Feet in. They were shooting at us all morning and afternoon. Perhaps 1000cap soldiers visible. This organization, people did not know where the commanding sergeants or officers were. Officers did not know where the men were. People were all over the place and they were in foxholes trying to figure out what to do next. Late in the day these got organized. I dont know. History tells of certain officers. Roosevelt, maybe forget whether it was a gotevelt, but he and other others got things together, engineers got their act together and brought torpedoes which were used to blow up the huge concrete barrier. Dday afternoon this huge explosion occurred and the concrete was blown up. Head out of my noisee and heard a huge and felt a shock and realized i had been hit. Head. Was a ringing in my thought, what has happened . See. Ld not my eyes were covered by a sheet of blood. Blood was soaking uniform. A head wound as a huge amount of bleeding but i felt no pain. Painfelt any pain or one. Day or d plus shock prevented me from feeling pain. Shock and atre first i could not talk. I tried to talk to another 20 orr from my battalion, 30 feet from me and words would not come out of my mouth. I have lost my ability to speak. And within only a few minutes i was able to talk, but words came pauseke that come along that, long pause, and i didnt speak normally until the next day. Tout my hands to my helmet see what had happened. I put one hand through the helmet and felt what i was sure must have been my brains because it was mushy. I felt half an inch of mush and i felt this must be the surface of my brains. Why is my brain functionally functioning . I put my other hand through the helmet hole, and both hands fitted through it. It was seven or eight inches wide. This helmet was almost split in half. I looked at the other officers nearby and i could see them looking at me. It looked to me as if i would not last very long and i did not think i would either. Hour, i continued i managed to stop the bleeding by taking the first aid bandage off of my belt and we had sulfur powder which we had been trained to poor into a wound. I forwarded it in poured it hour thefter half an bleeding let up. Was a big improvement and i thought i would live. It was less than half an hour i was sure i would die. I did not know why i could live with my brain exposed. I just seemed to be here. Medical help. A small british outfit landed with radar to coordinate with our own radar. But each was the british landed on a different set of beaches a few miles from us. But this british outfit had a captain who realized we wounded were lying there while mortars continued to pound us and had the good sense to move us to the base of the cliff where the water trajectory could not reach trajectory could not reach us. Could base, the mortars not reach you. He moved 20 or 30 of us there and probably saved our lives. In a book i wrote i said god bless the british. They are better soldiers than we are. They Work Together about doing something. Bday nighthe night night half awake. I remember one german plane flew over us. The wings were distinguishable by a sharp angle rather than a smooth shape. It dropped a bomb a quarter of a mile from where i was. I dont know if it did much damage. It may have killed some people. The night was not very eventful. The next morning the beach had changed entirely. During the night although the pillboxnot captured the at the top of the beach access cleaned theust have germans off of most of the area. I later learned they had gotten a few hundred yards, maybe a quarter of a mile inland. They had not captured the little town. They were in the process of it. The medics arrived and told me as soon as a Field Hospital was set up, they would move me up there. Not until 5 00 in the afternoon did i get any real medical attention. And then medics put me in a jeep which took some of the rest of the guys near me who were wounded, drove us to a Field Hospital in the outskirts of the little town at the top of the cliff. The Field Hospital was so close to the front there were bullets whizzing through the top of the tent. It took three men to pull the helmet off of my head. It had been jammed into my scalp. There were two captains and a major. One of them said this is quite a bit different from my practice in miami. Happened. Em what had they said that wasnt your brains you were feeling. Inch of fleshn you have above the skull. Most of us feel something very tough and assume it is bone. It is not. It is a membrane our hair grows out of. Below that membrane of skin is flesh between the top of your skin and bone. That was not flesh i had been feeling. Scars onf my skull had it and my head was full of fragments of metal. It still has tiny fragments in it to this day. Dont seto small they off metal detectors. But they are there. Bits areay, 14 little left. Pieces of my helmet liner, made when iboard, came out count my care for at least i combed my hair for at least a year. At dartmouth, i would be combing my hair and dark green helmet came out. So that night they got me on a boat back to england. Ent to a Field Hospital not southhampton. Maybe i will get the name later. And i had an operation there. They took skin from my leg and closed up the wound on my head. I thought to myself, i have been wounded, i assume the army sends you back to the states. Took only a week or two for me to be disabused. They have given you all this training, they will not suddenly send you home. I found myself back in action a month later. But that my surprise was the way it was done. I was able to rejoin my outfit by hitchhiking around and finding them. Then. S. Army had been and when i think is still about policy of not trying to put you back with your outfit. The french and british had a policy of sending you back to your old outfit. That was important for your morale, and it was. To have to meet a bunch of officers you have not trained with would be unattractive. 110th maybe five or 10 miles inland. Officer. A slot for an a couple of officers were out of action. I went into another battery. I had been in b battery. I went to a battery as the executive officer. The executive officer was in charge of 90 millimeter guns while others had jobs of being in terms of the 15 millimeter machine gun. We had they were very devastating in firepower for lowflying planes. Mile of quarter of a where you were based. I rejoined our outfit and was with it when we entered paris. I probably will not get the exact date but i think it was in early august. Went on to we belgium. In two cities. In liege we were under fire from , which are not very frightening. They seldom hit a target. The germans could not name them at anything specific, not at the building or even without half a mile of anything they want to because the rockets were not that controllable. They went into the upper atmosphere and then down. Five of see four or them in a day but hitting a field or roadside, taking a big hole. Sort of frightening to be underneath them. In a city like london they could do damage because buildings were so close together. V2s were very frightening for the british but not any more open town like liege. Spa, we were there in october and november and we were close to the german boarder. Miles from was 30 the german border. Border. T was on the it looked like we would be in germany and the war would be over within the matter of a month or two because we did not see much hope gradually crossing the border from the south up to the north where the british were. All of a sudden on december 16 the germans had a massive counterattack with huge numbers of tanks and over 20 or 30 divisions. Troops led this attack. Trained andghly loyal to the nazis. Pushed through our lines like butter partly because we have relatively untrained troops at the front. Untrainedrelatively troops at the front. They landed a month before. They were barely used to the area they were defending. The germans knew it well because they had defended it in world war i and even in world war ii areahad come through that on the way into france. It was not an area that you would expect people to attack. The woods and little towns, it was hard to drive through. Jump, it was called the that hard of belgium was called the hertkin forest. Toesone remembers freezing and fingers and it was miserable. We moved from spa where we were in antiaircraft defense down to being antitank weapons. We had not been well trained. We knew how to do it, but we had sites designed for to present was related to it, but we had to figure out we would do it because our guns were among the best in terms of firepower to destroy even a tiger tank. Gun as heavy as ours. 88. Had an we were deployed in antitrain positions around normandy. The germans came in and made a shape like that which is why it was called the battle of the bulge later. It was not called that at the time. Normandy was up here. We were critical to preventing the germans from getting on the road to antwerp, which was their goal. Everyone a good they were hoping to split the american and british armies. Everyone figured they were hoping to split the american and british armies. They would get some sort of truce with us and be able to stop the war there. I dont think they expected troops from the russians. Fortunately, forget how deep the bulge was but it was not more than 50 or 60 miles. It was over 50 miles. At the far ends, may have been as deep as 80 or 100 miles from where the lines have been. Whichurrounded bastone was now in the south. There was a famous story about how general mcauliffe met a german team that came to ask for his surrender. Ne wasately bastog liberated by the third army by patton within a number of days after that. Togne actually been in bas a week before it was captured because our outfit had been ofen the shore chore helping with the red ball express. We had a lot of trucks. We would carry ammunition down resupplying ond 15a week before the december attack, december 16 attack. Two weeks before the germans were thoroughly contained. It looked pretty grim because they were capturing and killing huge numbers of american soldiers. I later learned there were 40,000 killed. I might have to check the military records but there was a huge number, one of the largest losses in any American Battle or perhaps the largest loss. Gettysburg had huge numbers of dead. That was on our own soil. In foreign combat, im not sure there has ever been a battle as extensive as this was in terms of losses of dead and wounded. I mentioned earlier the relatively untrained troops. Timehad half the training we did. Many of the troops landed had only six months of training. The officers did not know their men through well and the equipment. They had not been seasoned. Germanhighly trained troops came out of them, they sliced through them and captured and killed huge numbers. Anchoring at the town of normandy. It was vital we hold on to this town because if it was lost, the germans would be on the road to antwerp. They would have gone on to spa and further. What happened rather dramatically to me around fronter 29, i was at the in a command post. We were based with infantry in a farm house. My job was to alert our guns were about a quarter of a mile behind us if any german tanks were coming in. In retrospect it is unclear what would have happened to us if the germans actually were coming by. But we had infantry with us. We would have infantry and our artillery would be trying to hold back the german attack. Noon,rning i think around fighter planes approaching. I looked out the window and b24ssee the 24 opening. I could see the bombs in the air as they were beginning to fall from the bomb bays. I picked up the phone i was supposed to use to alert the battery, and i said we were being bombed by our own bombers. A bomb hit our house and flattened it. Us underneath the huge weight of the upper stories. Hit a dining beam room table and contained the weight of the house from hitting us, where we had been sitting near the dining room table. Three of us were buried there. Minutes, ionly a few was able to heave off the brush and Building Material all over me. Soldiers, two other poral mick Anne Reinhardt mccullen and reinhardt. I was sure i was alive but they were not. They werent sure they had all of their limbs. 20 or 30em out within minutes and learned about half of the people in the farmhouse had been killed and some of us had survived. The belgian family were killed on their own stairwell to the basement. Both children and husband and wife. Several infantrymen were killed. We were lucky. I had a second i was given a purple heart which i thought was unusual. Your own troops shoot you. It never occurred to me you got a purple heart, but you did, if you were wounded. The wounds were mostly cuts of glass. They all healed. There was a cut here that was visible for a long while. My arms and legs, i could have ehouseily killed by falling on a house falling on you, heavy belgian farmhouse but this deem beam hitting the table is almost certainly what saved us. After a month we were entering germany again. The battle of the bulge lasted a little over a month. The rhine,re across the American Army put out a call for volunteers for medical military government. As we were taking over the german towns, we realized we did not have enough officers to administer the towns we were capturing. I volunteered. I spoke french and german. I have been fairly good at languages and i thought this might prepare me for post military career if i do something besides just being in army of occupation. I joined the military Government Team in march 1945. We were put in charge of displaced person camps. These had as many as 20,000 displaced persons in the. We had they were people who had been working in german factories. Now germany was falling apart, they had no means of staying alive unless they were put in these camps. We were in charge of the first 20,000 in cologne, another 20,000 of a different town, the camera. Leica we could see the factory. We were told we would be put in charge of the buchenwald concentration camp as soon as it was liberated. Turns out the first army did not inerate the camp as planned april. Weimar, il patton and dont think he called general bradley to say he would do it at patton was rather freewheeling general. If he could get tanks ahead of everybody, he would do it. He took weimar, and we were not there for the first week the camp was liberated. Patton and general eisenhower and general bradley all visited the camp within the second day after it was liberated, april 13 perhaps. I think it was. 14thprobably went in the or so. They saw the hundreds of bodies and learned about the awful things which had happened, which had had about 20,000. Camp shouldthe remain how it was so people could see how it was. The American Press descended and pictures were taken, movies and stills. It was the most widely ,ublicized of the camps partly because it was huge, the biggest of the concentration camps. It was a work camp. People get them confused with the extermination camps, like auschwitz in poland was designed to kill people at the rate of 1000 a day. Who can vault was a buchenwald was a work camp. They had a quarry. They had a factory which made v1 rockets. If you had people working in a factory, there was no point in feeding them so little they could not function. Which would have been the case at a place like auschwitz. Deaths occurred at buchenwald. Machine gunning 7000 russians were all killed in a feud a, i think in retaliation for germans in a few days, i think in retaliation for germans killed in russia. There may have been a reason. There were 56,000 deaths attributed to buchenwald. We arrived there week after third army had liberated the camp and we were the first camp administration. The week after we had been there, captain paul, the commander i was his executive officer captain ball put me in charge of buchenwald. Here i was at 22 in charge of 20,000 liberated prisoners. It is amusing. Because i spoke french and german, i was the only member of our team who was able to communicate easily with the prisoners. Almost all of them spoke german although they came from many countries. So i was very the occupied for several weeks very preoccupied for several weeks then. As an of the war was over, as 8,n as the war was over, may we were able to get trucks and send people back to germany or france. Of may, most of the prisoners had been sent home and we had only poles and russians left in large numbers. 4, we turned it over to the russians and there were almost no prisoners. The russians turned it into a concentration camp for prisoners that they had reason to imprisoned. I dont think it became as bad as the old buchenwald, but there was nothing good about it. Like the russian gulags. The reason we turned it over was because weimar was going to be the east part of germany, the russian occupied part. Down to a i went north ofunty stuttgart. Eihingen. Lled w there i was the second in command of a military team that andnistered food and food whatever the needs of a small town. North of a highly. Mportant city, stuttgart we were there for a few months and then sent home in december. Norwichrth back in for a in december. Made plans to study at dartmouth, dartmouth allowed you to punish by studying in the finish by studying in the summer area they give you credit for being in officer candidate school. They were very accommodating in helping officers. Us g. I. Bill was vital to paying for college is. Most of us had no resources. Norwich, lived in vermont. They were not in a good situation to finance my college education. Delighted the g. I. Dartmouth. Through and i wonder if that winds up what i want to say. Take a step act here for a second. You gave me a good summary of your service. How did you find out about pearl harbor . Norwich,i was in vermont, on main street and i was walking north towards the church from my familys home. Somebody coming down the street said have you heard about the attack in the pacific . They told me about it. I went to a radio as soon as i could and learned more about what was happening. , when ithe time of day learned about it, i am not sure but i believe it may have been around 2 00 in the afternoon. How would you rate the training . Would you do you feel you were trained pretty well . Clinton i thought the Army Training was fine. They allowed our outfit plenty of time for everybody to get to know each other. The Army Instruction manuals were adequate. Of course the lives, information from other officers and whatnot. Officer candidate school was intense but good. They jammed enough information into you. If you were really not cut out to be an officer, they determined that. A few people washed out of ocs. Relegated well educated and a year at dartmouth, i was in some positions a judge whether you were being welleducated. I thought you were. What was it like for you to get on the queen mary and go overseas . That is a big adventure for a 21yearold guy going overseas. What was that like . Clinton we have repaired our minds for the fact we would be prepared our minds for the fact we would be going to europe. Im trying to think i had not been on a big ship ever. I had sailed off of cape cod in little sailboats. This was my First Experience on a ship. Thing that was dramatic was the crowding, the people were jammed like side deans like sardines, roughly 15,000 men. Which the ship went and how we were able to change course regularly was interesting. If it got across the atlantic in five days, i was astonished we were able to do that. Everybody thought of several weeks. We were going through areas in the north atlantic where i thought there might be icebergs. Forgot why we maybe we were able to maybe there were devices where you could detect icebergs with radar. I dont know what detection there were. Case i found mostly a problem from being seasick from my point of view. Upwhen you guys were loaded what wass time to go, that moment like for you when you knew that this is it, we are going in . Clinton i think we were so welltrained to expect it that like of course this is what is going to happen. I dont recall being particularly afraid. Training. E that to if you have been trained, if you have crawled under real machine gun fire, which was part of the training, and if you stood up, you would have been hit by a bullet. You were aware this was a serious matter you were involved in. If you had spent a year anticipating going in, a year and a half actually, it seemed like the next step. It was not a shock. I dont recall being afraid. In retrospect i am afraid i am sure fear was not a part of the equation. The ratherit was not a stoic acceptance of the fact this is what i was called to do. It is why im in training. If we dont defeat kittler hitler, we might not have any country left in the u. S. Many say we fight the war fighting er was killing the jews. In liberating the concentration camps, we learned why the war had to be fought. I have thought that was a dark dumb argument. But we ourselves any liberal or socialist in england or in the u. S. Would have been put in a concentration camp by hitler. The whole western world was in danger of being dominated by nazis. My family would have been killed. I would have been killed if hitler had taken over power in this country. I thought it was self preservation. The motive for landing and exposing yourself was not to do something nice for the french. It was to preserve your own civilization as well. The british and the americans. Amazingly enough i went to Church Services every night maybe not every night but frequently, while we were locked up in that special camp where we were under topsecret bigot control. I went. I was a protestant, but i happened to go to protestant and catholic services. We used to joke just in case. When you got topside that you landed on did you land in the clinton lct. When you got topside, what did you see . First i was up at least 5 00. We knew the invasion would not begin for a half hour. At first we saw nothing. It was just black. There was no smoke or anything like that. Sky. Recall, it was a dark there were low crowds clouds. No moonlight or starlight. 5 30, was the first noise and sounds of the invasion beginning. Flashes on the horizon caused by probably the guns from the texas and other large battleships that were supposed to start pounding various targets on the shore. I suppose they were we saw these flashes and her the thunder and explosions. , it was only about the last halfhour that we could see the shore emerging from the mist. Beachmber looking at the and identifying a house that had been built on the beach. If i ever see photos of this place again, i will were member that i landed where the south was. Find then i have tried to that house. I think it was flattened. I have not been able to determine it. We could see the church tower. We could see the cliff emerging from the mist. , we could seehour where we would be landing. When people bring up dday and omaha beach, what is the first thing that comes to your mind 70 years later . I think about how remarkable it is that i hear after having been hit. This dramatic wound in my head. I think what a tremendous difference it is between living and dying. Life has been extremely lucky. The factthink about that if my head had been happening joint and higher, my skull would have been split open. You mentioned saving private , someone who was not there, that movie puts me in a position. How do you feel that movie portray the events . On omaha. Based i have been told that. I dont know why they didnt shoot it in france. There were various logistic reasons. I thought it was well done. The cliff was well portrayed. They found an area with a similar cliff. They showed the pillbox which dominated. They showed it being captured at the end of the day. The pillbox i saw had not been captured. They had flamethrowers. A very dramatic weapon. Some people knew how to run flamethrowers. That was aa pillbox, good way of doing it. I was lying there wounded at the base of the cliff. Only 80 feet below that pillbox. It was right above me. The beachmen going up exit road with the flamethrowers. About half an hour later after a firefight, some of the germans had surrendered. They led them down the road. That was a small difference. It had featured rather prominently in the phone. He dramatized things at where hening, engineers those bodies swirling in the bloody water, that was very realistic. It dramatized that the engineers had tremendous losses. It was a very realistic portrayal of what he had been like on dday. Before you got hit, was there ever a moment when the thought ran through your head, i not going to make it . I dont recall thinking that. I could see a few hundred dead from where i was. I was ill and threw up at about noon. Dont think it was the side of the bodies. That is one of the peculiar things that happen to me during the day. After you got hit and you , youzed you were bleeding mentioned there was some doubt in your mind as to whether you would survive. What is the Lasting Impact of that moment on your life . That is a philosophical question. One could say take one step at a time. The whole thing is to take one step at a time. Do your best in the current day. Never know when something untoward is going to happen to you. People at this age say they have already won the race. Concerned about whether something untoward will happen to them. You recovered from your wounds and you are thrown back into your unit. How did the guys receive you . Where they happy to see you . I dont recall the relationship between officers and enlisted men. I found myself much more mature when i went back. Be a firstr young to lieutenant. Before i had been wounded, i was to bes not mature enough leading the men. After the wound, i had aged very quickly. I was probably a better officer when i was second in command of the battery. I was more able to handle the of the officer to the enlisted man. When you arrived at , it was more of a work camp. The more some of intense things that you saw there to speak to nazi brutality . Deal byighted great camp able to talk to the prisoner who was called the camp elder. They delegated much of the internal administration to the camps to a group of prisoners. They decided to be in charge of security, making sure that no prisoner escaped. He was called the camp elder. I was able to talk to him. Buchenwald was probably the best of the camps to be yet. I am probably the only person alive in the world who has heard that. The prison their Self Administration was done in the last five or six years by german communists. These german communists kept the therom knowing much of what prisoners wanted to keep from their knowledge. The prisoners were able to squirrel away a lot of guns. They liberated themselves 24 hours before the third army troops arrived. Of this german communist administration, a minimum of brutality occurred at buchenwald. The worst thing was called the little camp. Any jews at buchenwald were in the little camp. Jews were often sent to auschwitz to be killed. They were all in the little camp where people where that the germans did not care much about. The food was not a good quantity. The death rate was high. This was a camp that had special art wire around it. Wiesel and his father were both in the little camp. Wiesel was in the infirmary when the camp was liberated. Years and saw him several ago and gave him a map of the camp that he had never seen. I think you have given me a pretty good summary of your service. I want to thank you for allowing me into your house to sit down and talk to you. I have a few questions i would like to ask you. Do you believe it is important that we have museums such as the one i represent to further educate and enlighten future generations . I certainly do. It tickets two years of intense effort to gather the memoirs and put out the book. We were doing a museumlike effort and that. Do you believe it is important that middle school and High School Kids continue to learn about world war ii . I learned very little about world war i in school. Impression that the picture has entirely changed. How did the war affecting affect you and how you live your life . Did you ever experience any issues with ptsd . I didntamazed that have any formal shock from either wound. The dday wound was dramatic. It was not comfortable not knowing if you had your limbs. The army gave us a pill. It knocked you out for 24 hours. They gave us that to reduce the chances of shock. Whole body was relieved of being awake for Something Like 24 hours. I recall recovering from that wound. And the shock of the bomb falling on the house. The armys way of handling it worked out very well. I am surprised to this day that i dont have flash backs that father me. Been told that if you talk about a thing, it is better than to bottle it up. I have heard that since i was a kid. It is element or psychology. I think that is probably true. I rode up the story of my experiences. I kept talking about it right along. Ithink that is one reason dont have any ptsd. People are going to look at this tape 200 years for now. What would your message be to future americans watching this tape about your service and world war ii . All of us who were fighting thought that would be the last great war. This has been enough to keep us from a third world war. Bomb haveh the atom enabled ourselves to exterminate the entire human race and in the human story. Nothing could be more dramatic than that. All you would have to have happen is to be mortal enemies. We have reduced our Nuclear Arsenal substantially. But the two nations have the ability to wipe each other out. And leave enough contamination kill the rest of the worlds population. We still have the ability to exterminate each other. I think we have an ongoing lesson to take quite seriously. There cannot be a third world war and thus we want to contemplate the extermination of the entire race. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2019] each week and we explore our nations past. This sunday, the fleet that came to stay, a 1945 u. S. Navy found assembled from aerial and ship combat footage of the battle of okinawa. Heres a preview. They call it, causing kamikaze. We call them suicide planes. They specialize in oneway trips. Their destination, the deck or hall of any american ship. Weapon was no secret to our gunners. Now to meet our latest challenge. They used every plane that could fly. 16yearolds, still in aviation school, were given their wings, a sash, and a mission. This was a maniacal, allout effort to isolate our troops. It was desperation, it was suicide. But it would be the pattern from now on to the very finish. A struggle between men who want to die and men who fight to live. [explosions] watch People Program the sunday of work p. M. Eastern. Changed sincehas cspan began 41 years ago. Our mission continues, to provide an unfiltered view of government. We brought you primary election coverage, the impeachment process, and now the federal response to the coronavirus. Cspansatch all of Public Affair programming on television, online or listen on our free radio app. Cspan, created by private industry as a public service. Brought to you by your television provider. This year, cspan is touring cities across the country, it flowing american history. Our recent visit to college station, texas. In 2019, the George H W Bush president ial Library Music and received film adage of the president and misses bush on their honeymoon in sea island, georgia

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